Hangin' and Bangin' #32 Buck video Thursday 8pm EST

I was especially interested in this bit:

"When the SWU was starting out we played a place called The Southampton Breakfast Club, which existed for probably about 6 months, you'd play like at 6 a.m. after a night of revelry at this place and we opened at that show for Leslie..."

Buck, you mentioned opening for Leslie West there, which implies a fairly formal situation of an opening band followed by a headline act, and so on, but when Mrs Buck mentioned that venue some years back, she described is a much more informal affair, with people like Leslie West popping up onstage and jamming away etc...

One of our favorite venues, for a time, was the Southampton Breakfast Club out on the East End of Long Island. It was a short-lived after hours club, not opening until after midnight. The band played most of the night. Other musicians would come down and jam, including Leslie West from Mountain. One night we met a guy who first claimed to be Archie Bell of "Tighten Up" fame, then claimed to be Archie Bell's brother, when we were skeptical. That incident led to the line in Meltzer's "Arthur Comics", "then you will know the REAL Archie Bell". The coolest part of the gig was that after the band finished playing (usually at dawn), the management would feed us a huge breakfast of steak and eggs. We'd all sit at a long banquet table eating as much as we could and savoring the delicious food, knowing that we'd be going back to strange chicken parts for dinner and the occasional can of tuna fish for breakfast. After the meal, we'd head back to Great Neck, sleep all day, get up in the late afternoon or early evening and drive back to Southampton to do it all again."

If it had been an actual Mountain headline gig, I'd probably stand more chance of pinning a date to it as there might be promo ads in the local paper etc... as it is, my current best guess is approx Jul-Aug 1971, so it would have been an "SFG" gig (I know they signed to Columbia at the end of July as "BOC", but for the next 3 months or so, they still played as "SFG", I'm guessing because that's the name the gigs were probably originally booked under...

OK, cheers - I was just checking... I'll suspend my Newsday search on all 1971 gigs...   

Completely unrelated, and I should mention that I don't think these gigs actually happened - simply because nobody I've asked can stand them up - when SWU were at least scheduled to play the local Bouchard haunt, O'Brien's in Clayton, at the end of June 1969 (3/4 days prior to the infamous Fillmore East gig) they were billed as being "Southampton-based", the significance of which I never understood:

That's interesting that you know his name, because this is the ONLY - potential - occasion I've ever come across where your paths might have crossed... obviously, Eric played O'Brien's with the Lost and Found in 1967 and 1968, so, of course, he'd certainly be familiar with the venue - and the owner - but because you mentioned him by name, I have to ask - can you categorically state that the SWU NEVER played O'Brien's...?

When does the book come out, Ralph? I love this stuff.

Those particular SWU adverts were significant, if only for their dates - Fri 27 Jun and Sat 28 Jun 1969... Eric is on record as saying that his first ever gig was at a CT deb party (with Lester Lanin) and his second gig was "in at the deep end" at the Fillmore East on 3rd July with Jeff Beck - these SWU ads seemed to show a couple of previously unknown gigs before that Fillmore East gig - they'd actually have made sense as they'd have given Eric - and the band - a bit of a warm up prior to the big gig but I can't find any indication they actually happened, other than the adverts...